


where we are in the grand scheme of things

by strangetowns



Category: Druck | SKAM (Germany)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Trans Character, Established Relationship, Gender Identity, M/M, Nail Polish, Post-Canon, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-27 06:51:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19785490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangetowns/pseuds/strangetowns
Summary: Slowly, hesitantly, he reaches out. Grasps the tiny glass bottle. Opens his hand flat and bends his head over it.And he stares at the black nail polish resting in the palm of his hand.He stares at it for a very long time.-Matteo paints his nails for the first time. David helps him.





	where we are in the grand scheme of things

**Author's Note:**

> This is a little late for pride month but in my defense I did write it like a month ago in the spirit of pride so like just pretend for a hot second. This is basically a quick little thing imagining Matteo and David navigating gender norms together. Hope you enjoy!
> 
> Thank you as always to [Lyds](http://boxesfullofthoughts.tumblr.com/) for being the best beta reader in the world, as well as the other people I asked to read this and give me their thoughts. Title is from "[Hugging You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGFk295eW9o)" by Tom Rosenthal.

Matteo’s been at the store for way too long already, he knows. Should have left ten minutes ago to beat the rush hour home. Annoyingly, though, he just can’t rid himself of the feeling that he’s forgotten something. He feels like that a lot of the time, but especially when he has actual responsibilities to fulfill. Never fully feels like he’s getting it right, no matter what it is. Been years and he’s still never quite gotten the hang of shaking off that nagging thought. He tilts his head back toward the fluorescent white lights, squinting as he counts the number of times they flicker. He wishes department stores had friendlier lighting. It would be less distracting.

He sighs, and glances down at the shopping list on his phone. He’s got dinner for most of the week covered, at least - when it comes to food he mostly shops on instinct, and his gut hasn’t failed him yet - but it’s the other stuff that usually tends to slip his mind. The toilet paper, the soap, the practical considerations. David texted him a short list of reminders before he left, and that’s the message he checks now. Last item on the list - shampoo. He tightens his grip around the handles of his shopping basket and walks to the right aisle.

He scans the shelf. Finds the right brand, after some scrutiny. Wraps a hand around the bottle, tosses it into the basket. Turns around to leave.

As he walks by the cosmetics section, he turns his head. Absently. Unthinkingly.

And before he knows it, almost without his realizing, his steps have stumbled to a halt.

His gaze is caught on a small, nondescript bottle full of thick black liquid. And for some reason, he can’t seem to look away.

Almost instinctively, Matteo looks over his shoulder. He’s the only one in the aisle. Still. He’s suddenly, painfully aware of how hard his heart is hammering in his chest. He knows this particular beat very well; knows this prickling heat in his fingertips, the palms of his hands, like he knows his own name. This fear of someone catching him doing the wrong thing. It’s a feeling that’s haunted him for months, years, half his life. Just because he’s gotten better at taming it doesn’t mean it doesn’t still live inside him. Somewhere deep and dark and hidden, to be sure. But there nonetheless.

He does know how to tame it, though. Surely that must count for something.

He takes in a slow breath. In through his nostrils. Out through his mouth.

Slowly, hesitantly, he reaches out. Grasps the tiny glass bottle. Opens his hand flat and bends his head over it.

And he stares at the black nail polish resting in the palm of his hand.

He stares at it for a very long time.

Then he wraps his fingers around it, like closing his hand around a jewel, and heads to the self check-out line before he can think about changing his mind.

After Matteo pays for the groceries and the shampoo and everything else, he buries the nail polish at the bottom of his bag, and resolutely forgets about it. All the way from the store to the bus to the sidewalk home, he doesn’t think about it. He gets to his front door, unlocks it, kicks it shut behind him. Doesn’t think about it. Drops the bag onto the kitchen table, pulls out everything he bought, slowly and methodically puts it all away. Still is doing his very best not to think about it.

Sooner rather than later, though, he’s run out of things to do, and the only thing left in the bag is the thing itself. He looks at it, for a long moment. It looks so small and insignificant like this, swathed in all that empty space. He almost feels bad for it, a little, how lonely it looks. Which is a dumb thought. Still, it’s enough motivation for him to grab it and place it gingerly on the table.

It looks even smaller out in the open, sitting in front of him. So utterly inconsequential. Matteo can’t stop staring at it, half-hoping it might start making sense to him why he bothered spending the money on this when half the time he can’t even be bothered to spend money on decent toothpaste, but as each second passes he feels more and more stupid in a vague and indefinable way, and it makes less and less sense. Soon it makes no sense to him at all.

Stupid. Christ, this is so stupid. It’s stupid he bought it. It’s stupid he can’t stop thinking about it now that it’s right here in front of him, stupid he can’t just shove it in a drawer somewhere and forget it exists. Everything about this is fucking stupid.

It’s just - there was something. Wasn’t there? Matteo thinks back to that moment in the store. Every detail of the display astonishingly vivid in his mind. All the colors, lining up in countless rows to form gradients that made his eyes hurt. But there was something specific that made him turn his head. A banner above the nail polish stand. A picture of a woman’s perfectly manicured hand. Nails painted a shining, beautiful crimson.

He saw that picture and he thought about his mother’s hands when he was a child, before it all went to shit, before she completely lost it and had to get help he couldn’t offer her. Years before she’d made a habit of chewing her nails down to the skin until her fingertips bled, she’d kept them in such meticulous condition, had even taken pride in how well she cared for her nails. She liked to change the color of them every week, and so every week he sat next to her and watched, entranced, as she carefully wiped the polish off each finger, the faint stinging smell of acetone tingling in his nostrils, and patiently replaced the old color with a new one. Always, she put herself through the same painstaking routine. One coat, two, three. Clear nail polish for the top, to seal it. If he closes his eyes now he can see her favorite colors, the exact shades of them. Red, like in the picture today; soft pink, also; and white, and pale blue.

Once, Matteo had asked, shyly, if she could paint his nails, too. The colors were so bright and wondrous; they were so beautiful it made his head spin just to look at them. He remembers wondering what it would be like to carry colors like that on the very tips of his fingers every day, for the whole world to see.

His father, who had overheard, took it upon himself to answer before his mother could even open her mouth.

“No,” he said, and even at Matteo’s age the dismissiveness in his father’s tone was cutting enough to sink deep into his young bones. “That stuff isn’t for boys.”

And so Matteo never asked again.

Somewhere along the way, he’d almost forgotten he’d wanted to.

Today, there’s no one here to tell him this tiny, stupid bottle isn’t for boys. He is, of course, the only one in the entire flat. But in a less literal way, it’s true, too. He’s been getting better at realizing that these days. That the voices from his childhood - his father; his teachers; his old friends, even - don’t exist, not anymore, not in a way he’s obligated to lend any weight to. That the voice inside himself, the one that was so quiet for so long, whispering him his wants and dreams in a way he’d been told for half his life to ignore, is a voice he deserves to listen to.

And yet. And yet, the memory of the other voices have echoed through his thoughts for so long they haven’t yet stopped  _ feeling _ real. He honestly doesn’t know if they ever will.

God, Matteo lets himself think again. This is so incredibly stupid. But this time, there’s an edge to the words. A challenge that he recognizes. If this is stupid, what the hell does it matter either way? And when he thinks of it like that, he realizes this is a thought he can turn into a weapon. A sword piercing through his doubts.

He lets himself imagine it. A blade slicing through the thoughts in his head that don’t belong to him.

The image brings him a certain measure of comfort. It’s not enough to make the whirlwind in his head stop, but sometimes a little bit is all he needs. He reaches out, and takes hold of the bottle.

Despite this sudden bout of reckless bravery, his hands are shaking. He has to keep the bottle on the table, for fear he might spill the contents of it all over the wood. He unscrews it and pulls out the brush, bringing it to his thumb. As soon as he does it he remembers, the realization hitting him like a freight train, that he has never, ever done this before in his life. Which means there’s no way he can get it right.

His grip on the brush swerves, and black streaks against the side of his thumb, halfway down to the crease of his hand.

He stares down at his ruined thumb. Stares and stares and stares. Like maybe if he stares long enough, the black will swallow him whole.

And then the front door opens.

Matteo’s head snaps up as David walks in, pulling his hat from his hair.

“Hey,” David says. “What’re you up to?”

Matteo can only watch as David’s eyes flicker down. He knows he’s taking in the scene, knows there’s no way he can miss what’s happening here. There’s nothing to fear, around David - David is the very last person Matteo would ever experience that feeling around - but there’s what he knows on a logical level and there’s what he knows on a molecular level, in the atoms of himself, and it’s this level that takes over his thoughts now, that makes him feel exposed in a way that freezes up his entire body.

David looks up at Matteo, again. Everything is still, for a heartstopping second. 

And then David crosses the distance between the doorway and the table in short, purposeful steps. He pulls the bottle gently from Matteo’s loose grip and holds it up to the light, peering at it thoughtfully.

“Black,” he says, “is going to look fucking amazing on you.”

And just like that, as if someone has poked the balloon of tension in Matteo’s chest with a needle, he can breathe again. A snort escapes his lungs before he can quite stop it. Not that he wants to stop it, really. Feels good to laugh.

“I think you’re biased,” Matteo says. “You like black. And you love me.”

David puts the bottle carefully back on the table. “Yeah?” he says, bursting into a grin. It’s breathtaking, as usual. “So?”

Matteo smiles back, helplessly. “Um,” he starts, and finds he can’t continue.

David takes hold of a chair, drags it over next to Matteo and sits down in it. He props his chin on his hand, looking at Matteo out of the corner of his eye. And he doesn’t say anything. He just waits.

Something about his patience, his willingness to exercise it, calms something inside Matteo. As it always does. He lets his gaze float over to the bottle of nail polish on the table. “Do you - can you help me with this?” Matteo grimaces. “Not because - well, you’re an artist, you probably have - steadier hands than me, or something.”

David’s eyes, now, are soft; impossibly so.

“Sure,” he says, knocking their knees together. It’s an unbelievably comforting sensation. “Did you buy acetone?”

“Oh.” Matteo looks down, chagrined. “No.”

“Hm. That’s okay.” David grabs hold of his other hand, the one without a thumb that Matteo had made a complete mess of. “I’ll just start with this.”

It really does sound okay, when he puts it like that. “Okay,” Matteo echoes, just to feel the shape of the word for himself.

David drags the bottle of nail polish closer to him and slides his other hand down Matteo’s arm, thumb brushing over the bone of his wrist. It’s such a small gesture. Matteo feels it down to his core.

And then David bends over Matteo’s fingers, and he gets to work.

As Matteo had thought, David’s hands are much steadier than his. From the care he takes, slow and halting and far from practiced, it’s clear David doesn’t have much experience with this, either. But his hands are still, and his strokes are steady. The black on Matteo’s nails gleams dully in the light. It’s mesmerizing.

David finishes with Matteo’s smallest finger, and frowns. “Do I do multiple coats?” he muses. “Is that a thing?”

Matteo shrugs. “Maybe the bottle says.” He reaches for it, and in the process knocks his knuckles against it at an angle he hadn’t intended. It wobbles dangerously, and David has to lash his hand out, lightning fast, to steady it before it falls over.

“Wow,” David says. “I can see why you asked me to do this for you now.”

Matteo glances at him. “Why’s that?”

“You’re clumsy as hell,” David says, smirking like the little shit that he is.

“Shut up,” Matteo says, and shoves his newly painted fingers into David’s face.

David grabs wildly at his hand, laughing. “Don’t! You’ll ruin all my hard work!”

Of course, Matteo never wants to do that. So he immediately relents, and pulls his hand away. He drops his face onto David’s shoulder; it’s easier to let himself fall than it is to not. An arm wraps around Matteo’s shoulders, and something presses to the crown of Matteo’s head. Something soft. A mouth, Matteo thinks; David’s mouth. He squeezes his eyes shut.

“Hey,” he says. “Can I ask you a question that might be really dumb?”

“None of your questions are dumb.”

Matteo wishes he believed that as easily as David says it. He wishes that about a lot of things.

“Um…” He bites his lip. “How’d you know you were a boy, growing up?”

He’s asked that before. They’ve talked about this before. And yet for some reason, he can’t stop thinking about it. How every time he looks at this bottle of nail polish, he hears his father and a hundred other people from his childhood people saying,  _ this isn’t for boys _ . Like it’s something definitive, something final. Of course, David would never say something like that; he’d never even think it. And he must know better than any of those other people what is and isn’t for boys. His voice, unlike theirs, is completely and utterly free of judgment. It’s always that way. So Matteo trusts him, wholly and unfailingly. Not just on this; on everything. He would listen to anything David has to say, a thousand times over. 

He wants to.

For a long while, David doesn’t say anything. His thumb strokes lightly at Matteo’s collarbone, a soothing motion that tells Matteo he somehow managed not to say the completely wrong thing.

Matteo waits for him to put his thoughts together.

At last, David presses his fingers to the pulse at Matteo’s neck, and that’s how Matteo knows he’s ready to speak.

“I guess it was just always there for me,” David says. “There’s a lot of things I didn’t know about myself back then. A lot of things I still don’t know about myself. But this - I think this was something I always knew.”

Matteo feels the words sinking around him. He imagines them falling through the air, like leaves floating on the wind. Settling softly on the forest floor inside of him.

“I don’t think I know what that’s like,” he confesses, very quietly.

He’s never said that out loud. Until this moment, he didn’t know the words even existed inside of him.

His heart trembles, a little, at this newly uncovered knowledge that actually, he knows less about himself than he thought. David at least knows some things. Matteo, though - maybe Matteo knows nothing at all.

After all this time there’s still so fucking much he doesn’t know.

David’s hand reaches up; drags slowly through Matteo’s hair. And somehow - somehow that’s all it takes. 

Now Matteo’s heartbeat feels like the steadiest song he knows.

“That’s okay,” David says.

Matteo lifts his head up and tilts his face toward him. David moves with him, wordlessly, easily. Brushes his lips across his forehead. His cheek. His mouth.

And Matteo lets him, because he wants him to. He wants to feel safe within the reliability of David’s warmth, wants to let all of his sweet kindness flood into him through the singular point where their bodies touch. He never feels more understood than when David kisses him.

After a while David presses his thumb into Matteo’s chin, and they break apart gently. Their foreheads knock lightly together. They both smile; Matteo can feel it.

“Should I do another coat?” David says.

Matteo nods, and David grabs the bottle.

After David finishes, they both bend over Matteo’s hand to admire his work.

“You look like such a badass,” David says.

Mateo’s laughter catches slightly in his throat. “You think so?”

“Yeah.” David squeezes his wrist. “Matches what’s on the inside, too.”

“You’re probably the only person in the world who’d say I’m a badass,” Matteo says, but he’s smiling again, smiling so widely. He can’t help it.

David catches his eye, and grins back. “Should I try to do your other hand now?” he says. “Maybe fix your thumb?”

Matteo glances down at the thumb on his other hand. The streak of black against his skin. He spreads both hands out on the table in front of him. The sheer contrast, one hand’s nails blank and rough at the edges, the other’s wreathed in shimmering shadows, probably wouldn’t make much sense to the world at large.

That’s probably true about a lot of things.

“Nah,” he says. “I kind of like it the way it is.”

**Author's Note:**

> A few notes:
> 
> -I would be lying if I said I didn't draw a lot from my own experiences as a nonbinary person in writing this fic. However I also want this fic to be open to be interpretation, so I hope that it works that way. I don't necessarily think you have to interpret Matteo's experiences in this fic as the beginnings of him exploring a nonbinary gender identity although you can if you want to!
> 
> -As I mentioned in the endnotes of my last druck fic, I'm currently working on two fairly large projects, and as I'm toiling away at those I'm also taking short prompts to try to build up a backlog, so if you have an idea you want to see happen check out [this post](https://canonicallyanxious.tumblr.com/post/186130080242/gonna-try-this-taking-prompts-thing-for-real-this) for more details!
> 
> -Find me on [tumblr](http://canonicallyanxious.tumblr.com) or [twitter](http://twitter.com/canonlyanxious)!
> 
> That's all I've got! Thank you for reading!


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